At first glance; privacy and ubiquitous computing seem to be highly incompatible; due to the ubicomp characteristic of being invisible. There are projects; trying to overcome this problem with different feedback mechanisms. In current literature; this approach is often referred to as privacy mirrors. The goal is to provide privacy awareness. It means making users aware about how their data is used by a specific service. However; there is little scientific work on the social impact of privacy awareness. That is; if privacy awareness is useful; accepted by the users and if it changes their usage behavior. Therefore; in this work; we examined the influence of privacy awareness on users to find the answers. We performed a user study with a privacy aware mobile service and conducted an online survey; which lead to interesting results; which we will present in this paper.

Inter: A European Cultural Studies : Conference in Sweden 11-13 June 2007